Today, many entities create and manage complex data centers capable of storing and accessing hundreds of terabytes of data (e.g., text, image, and video data) that are generated and consumed every day by their users. These complex data centers often need to be capable of creating and storing duplicate copies of this data for disaster-recovery, testing, regulatory, or other purposes. To cope with these storage needs, existing data storage centers often have hundreds or thousands of petabytes of storage capacity.
As the need for storage capacity increases, storage-system providers have attempted to meet these needs with storage systems having higher levels of storage density. In some cases, high-density storage systems simply have more storage drives packed into their chassis than their lower-density storage-system counterparts. Conventional storage systems may be housed within rack-mounted chassis and may be made up of various components that may fail. While many conventional storage systems are designed so that some of their components, such as storage drives, may be easily removed from the storage system's chassis and replaced when they fail, many conventional storage systems have been designed such that some components, such as storage-drive connectors and electrical connections, are impossible or impractical to remove or replace in a timely fashion.